CONTRA FATUM

"Attack the silence of Pythagoras, or the Orphic beans, or the extraordinary pretentiousness of "Thus spake the Master." Attack Plato's Ideas, and the Re-embodiments and Cycles of our souls, and their Recollections, and those distasteful love-affairs where the soul was the object, but the beautiful body the route. Then there is Epicurus' atheism, or his atoms, or his ideal of Pleasure, unworthy of a philosopher; or Aristotle's mean conception of Providence, his artificial system, his mortal view of the soul, and the human-centered nature of his teaching. Or what about the superciliousness of the Stoics, the greed and vulgarity of the Cynics? Attack "the Void" - which is full of nonsense, or all the mumbojumbo of gods and sacrifices, idols, demons beneficent or malignant, of soothsaying, summoning the gods or the spirits of the dead, and of the influences of the stars." (Gregory Nazianzus, or. 28??)

All truth, all philosophy, to be sure, is obscure, hard to trace out. It is like employing a small tool on big constructions, if we use human wisdom in the hunt for knowledge of reality. We do not abandon the senses, they go with us, when we look at supra-sensible realities. But by these same senses we are perplexed and led astray. We cannot get nearer the truth by meeting things in their naked reality with naked intellect. (Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 28,21)